What RPGs Have Taught Me About Effective Software Development Teams

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I grew up as a computer kid in the 80s and 90s and, consequently, spent a lot of time in video games. Now I manage two software engineering teams, and it’s time to prove to Mom that all those hours spent in Final Fantasy were actually valuable career development.

I’m primarily thinking about two video game genres: party-based RPGs and MMORPGs. The formula for these is pretty simple. You have a cast of characters with various capabilities, and they work together to accomplish amazing things. In order to succeed, you must be aware of your characters’ strengths & weaknesses, understand what skills are required to complete a challenge, and combine characters in a way that allows them to achieve the goal.

Well, that doesn’t sound so different from a software development team, does it? You’ve got a group of people with different abilities and aptitudes; you have a backlog of stories to complete; and the team must collaborate to achieve goals and accomplish amazing things. It’s, like, the same thing!

Given these undeniable parallels, what lessons from RPGs can be applied to software development teams?

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone

When you adventure alone in a video game, bad things don’t happen most of the time — but there’s risk. The same is true in software development, especially if individuals on your team are all working on separate things. The primary risks of soloing a software development project are consistency, quality, and knowledge-sharing.

Source

Working alone on projects offers short-term risk due to the fact that quality and completion time are largely dependent on who does the work. Someone who’s very experienced and understands the subject area well will probably get by fine, but a developer with less familiarity will take longer and be more likely to make mistakes that require re-work. Peer code reviews are slower and less effective because reviewers need to context-switch and focus deeply to understand decision-making and what’s been done. Individual stories are completed less efficiently because…